DOUBTFUL REMEDIES
The difficulties attending domestic service are so many and so pressing
that a large number of measures intended to meet them have been proposed,
all of them as varied as the personalities of those dealing with the
problem. This difference of opinion in regard to the best methods of
meeting the question is largely due to the fact that, not domestic
service as an occupation, but domestic servants as individuals have been
considered. It has also come from the fact that while the feudal castle
of the Middle Ages has shrunk to the city apartment, the attempt is made
to preserve intact the customs that had their origin in mediævalism
and ought to have died with it, overlooking the fact that every other
occupation has made at least some slight concession to economic progress.
Moreover, it must be said that the purely ethical phases of the subject
have been the ones most often kept in mind in discussing measures of
relief. This ethical side of the question is indeed important, but it is
largely based on the assumption that the relation between employer and
employee is a purely personal one. Since the discussion of the question
up to this point has been based on a different theory, namely, that
other relations besides the personal ones are established when that of
employer and employee is assumed, and that domestic service has been and
is affected by political, economic, industrial, social, and educational
questions, the present discussion of possible and impossible remedies
in domestic service cannot take into consideration the purely ethical
questions involved in the subject, but must deal with its other aspects.
Before attempting to answer the question of what can and what cannot
be done, a few general principles deduced from the consideration of
the subject up to this point must be indicated. First, since the evils
are many and complicated no panacea can be found. The patent medicine
that cures every physical ailment from consumption to chilblains is
disappearing before the scientific studies of the day; it is quite as
little to be recommended for economic and social maladies. Second, the
remedy applied must have some relation to the nature of the disease. A
sprained wrist will not yield to the treatment for dyspepsia, nor can
rheumatism and deafness be cured by the same brown pills. The principle
does not differ if moral remedies are administered for educational
diseases and economic maladies are expected to succumb to social tonics.
Third, reform in domestic service must be accomplished along the same
general economic lines as are reforms in other great departments of
labor—not at right angles to general industrial progress. Fourth,
reform in domestic service must be the result of evolution from present
conditions and tendencies—not a special creation. Fifth, no reform can
be instituted which will remove to-morrow all difficulties that exist
to-day. Domestic service cannot reach at a bound the goal towards which
other forms of labor have been moving with halting steps.
These principles are simple and will perhaps be generally accepted. A
few of the measures often suggested as affording means of relief may be
tested by them.
It is the opinion of a very large class that all difficulties can
be removed by the application of the golden rule. No belief is more
widespread than this. But it rests wholly on the assumption that the
relation between employer and employee is a personal one, and presupposes
that if this personal relationship could be made an ideal one the
question would settle itself. In so far as the connection between
mistress and maid is a personal one, the golden rule is sufficient, but
other factors are involved in the problem. The golden rule may be ever
so perfectly observed, but that fact does not eliminate the competition
of other industries where the golden rule may be observed with equal
conscientiousness, nor does it remove the distasteful competition of
American born employees with foreigners and negroes; it does not overcome
the preference for city life or the love of personal independence; it
is not always able to substitute intelligence, capability, interest,
and economy for ignorance, inefficiency, indifference, and waste; the
observance of the golden rule by the employer is not a guarantee that
it will always be followed by the employee. For moral difficulties,
moral remedies must be applied, but they will not always operate where
the maladies are in their nature economic, social, and educational. The
golden rule is a poultice that will relieve an inflammation but will not
remove the cause of the evil—a tonic that will invigorate the system but
which cannot be substituted for surgical treatment.
Another class of persons believes that the application of intelligence as
well as of ethical principles is what is required of the employer. This
position is best expressed by the correspondent of a leading journal who
says: “The capable housekeeper is quite satisfied with the performance
of her own domestic duties. If a true woman performs her whole duty,
that which lies within her sphere of action, this everlasting cry of
reform in domestic service would cease and in its place there would rise
a more satisfied race of human beings.” But intelligence, capability,
and the observance of all ethical principles must, like the golden rule,
encounter the question of free Sundays and evenings after six o’clock,
as well as that of the regularity of working hours and the possibility
of promotion found in other occupations. No system ever has been or
ever can be found that will enable a housekeeper to conduct a household
satisfactorily on the instinct or the inspiration theory, to substitute
sentiment for educated intelligence and for a knowledge of economic
conditions outside of the individual home. The ostrich is said to cover
its head in the sand and imagine that it is safe from capture; as well
may the individual employer say, “I have settled the question for myself;
it is sufficient and I am satisfied.”
A third suggestion in harmony with the two preceding is to receive the
employee into the family of the employer, giving her all of the family
privileges, including a seat at the table. This plan finds many advocates
among intelligent, conscientious employers who are earnestly trying to
find a way out of present troubles. But there are several objections
to it. One is the fact that such a policy is a distinct deviation from
all economic tendencies of the century. A hundred years ago under
the domestic system of manufactures the masterworkman received his
apprentices into his family, and no other arrangement seemed possible.
The factory system has revolutionized this manner of life, and a return
to it in manufacturing industries would be as impossible as a restoration
of the feudal system itself. The attempt to return to what was once a
common custom in many parts of the North is an attempt to restore the
patriarchal relationship between employer and employee in a generation
which looks with disfavor on paternalism in other forms of labor. Another
objection to the plan is its inherent impossibility. John Stuart Mill
could conceive of another world where two and two do not make four, but
it must in this world be at present an impossibility to conceive of a
family in which the idea of unity is not an essential feature. The very
foundation of a family is its integrity. Four plus one half can never
equal five, and no one can ever be more than a fraction in any family
into which he has not been born, married, or legally adopted. The family
circle cannot be squared, and if it could be, the curve of beauty would
be lost. Moreover, even if the plan could be carried out, it would not
meet the needs of the majority of employees or of those who would become
such if the conditions of service were more favorable. _What domestics as
a class desire is the opportunity of living their own lives in their own
way._ This is what other occupations offer to a greater degree than does
domestic service, and it is one reason for the preference for them. The
desire is not always on the part of the employees for the same friends,
the same amusements, the same privileges, the same opportunities, the
same interests, as those of their employers, but it is to have such
friends, such amusements, such privileges, such opportunities, such
interests, as they personally crave. Even what would be in themselves
the greatest advantages often cease to be such when the element of
personal choice in regard to them is removed. Still another objection is
the failure of the plan to subserve the best interests of the employer,
even granting that it is best for the employee. It grows out of the
nature of the family, as previously suggested. Comparatively few persons
are willing, except as a business necessity, to open their homes even
temporarily to those compelled to board. The privacy of home life is
destroyed to even a greater extent by the attempt to make household
employees permanently a part of it, not because those admitted within
the family circle are of this particular class, but because they are not
of the family. Marriage has been called a process of naturalization—a
difficult one when all the conditions are most favorable. The process is
infinitely more difficult when an extraneous element is introduced into a
family, not as a result of mutual choice, but of a business agreement.
A fourth proposition for lessening the difficulties in domestic service
is to increase the number of employees by bringing to the North negroes
from the South. So seriously has this plan been contemplated that
companies have in some places already been formed, and through them
colored servants have been sent to different parts of the Eastern
states. But this plan assumes that no perplexities exist where colored
servants are found, and also that there are no difficulties which
a greater supply of domestic employees will not remove. That the
former assumption cannot rightly be made is evident from many facts.
The anomalous condition is found in at least one Southern city of an
organization to assist Northern housekeepers to secure colored servants,
and of another to aid Southern housekeepers in obtaining white employees
from the North.[282] The examination of a large number of advertisements
for “help wanted” shows apparently a preference in many parts of the
South for white servants,[283] while the testimony of many employers
seems to show that service is at present in a transitional state—the
older generation is disappearing, while in the younger generation the
same tendencies are found as in other classes of employees.[284] The
second assumption, that the question is settled wherever the supply
is greater than the demand, also seems unwarranted in the judgment of
many.[285] These facts are in no sense to be regarded as an exhaustive
presentation of the condition of domestic service at the South; they only
indicate that in the opinion of many intelligent employers “the question
of negro help is as broad as the negro question itself.” If it has
proved such to those who know the negro best, there is little hope that
Northern employers would gain more than new and perplexing complications
by introducing as domestic servants large numbers of negroes from the
South.[286]
Another suggestion of the same character is the importation of Chinese
servants. While much has been said of the superiority of the Chinese as
household employees,[287] and not a few housekeepers would be glad to see
the restriction act repealed,[288] difficulties other than the present
legislative and political ones stand in the way of adopting this policy.
The Chinese, as well as the negroes, occupy in this country a social
position inferior to that of Americans or Europeans. Gresham’s law may
perhaps be applied to domestic service and the principle stated that
superior and inferior labor cannot exist side by side—the inferior must
drive out the superior. Unless employees of the lower social grade can
be imported in such numbers as to meet every call for domestic servants,
there must exist, as now, the discrepancy between supply and demand.
The old struggle between free labor and slave labor must be repeated
in miniature wherever the social chasm exists between two classes of
laborers. The introduction to any considerable extent of Chinese servants
would drive out European labor as that has in a measure driven out native
born American service.
As a means of promoting a better adjustment of the business relations
between employer and employee, it is sometimes proposed that licenses
should be granted domestic employees by municipal corporations. This
plan, however, would be a violation of the principles underlying
the granting of such licenses. A municipal body is not justified in
granting a license to any employment or industry unless such occupation
is objectionable in itself as entailing expense, or danger of expense
on the part of the taxpayers, as the sale of intoxicating liquors; or
unless it involves special use by non-taxpayers of city improvements made
at the expense of the taxpayers, as in the case of cabmen; or unless
it brings into competition with tax-paying industries trades which
contribute nothing to the general treasury, as is true of travelling
peddlers; or unless it brings special danger, as of fire in the case of
theatrical companies. The license is a tax imposed in return for special
risks incurred or privileges granted. Domestic service comes under
none of these principles, and to place it under the care of municipal
authorities as is not done with other occupations of its class would
be to degrade it in an unjustifiable way. The license, when granted in
accordance with a principle, is not more objectionable than an ordinary
tax; if granted without principle, it becomes an obnoxious and tyrannical
measure.
The system of German service books has been widely advocated as an
efficient means of securing reliable testimony as to the character and
capabilities of employees, thus removing one of the most serious of
present difficulties. But even in Germany, where obedience is man’s first
law, as order is heaven’s first law in other parts of the world, it is
impossible to obtain service books that do not need to be supplemented by
personal inquiries. The service book is of value in weeding out the most
inefficient employees, but it can do little more. As in any other form of
recommendation, the employer wishes to say the best possible thing for a
servant that he may not injure his prospects of obtaining another place.
Moreover, the law compels every employer to believe an employee innocent
until he is proved guilty. The employer must state that the servant is
honest unless he has proof positive to the contrary. He is not permitted
to say that he is suspicious, or even to leave out the word “honest.”
The policy is a necessary protection to the weaker class, but it must
vitiate somewhat the absolute reliability of the testimonials given. The
German service book has a place where all occupations are permeated by
government control, but it cannot be introduced into America. We must
work out our own system of improvement in household service as we have
worked out our own political system.
Other measures have been suggested that call for only a passing notice.
It is often proposed to call together a convention of housekeepers to
discuss the subject. But the mass must be disintegrated before anything
can be accomplished, and moreover the difficulty of calling together such
a convention and of securing through it any permanent results is the same
as is found in political circles in attempting to organize a citizens’
party.
Other housekeepers seriously advocate abolishing the public schools above
the primary grade on the ground that girls are educated above their
station, and they follow the plan of one who says, “I do not engage women
who have been beyond the third reader and the multiplication table.” The
quality of service obtained by such a policy is indicated by the remark
of the father of a remarkably stupid girl, “She ain’t good for much; I
guess she’ll have to live out.” No statement can be more fallacious than
that girls are educated above their station. There can be no so-called
“station” in a democratic country. We have given the reins to our
democratic views politically, and we must abide by the industrial and
social results.
Still other housekeepers advocate the introduction of housework into all
the public schools, and thus securing well-informed “help.” But both this
proposition and its converse overlook the fact that it is the function of
the public school _to educate_, not to supply information on technical
subjects.
In one large city a “Servant Reform Association” has been organized,
with an office on a prominent street-corner, and its name conspicuously
posted over the door and painted on all the window shades. Its clientele
is very large and embraces some of the best-known residents of the city.
Among other measures of reforming servants it plans for the establishment
of schools to be equipped with every household appliance, and “to have
for instructors women who are thoroughly schooled in the various branches
of household duties and domestic economy,” but it does not state where
such instructors are to be obtained. Nothing shows so clearly how the
times are out of joint as does the name of such an association.
The plan most widely advocated and believed to contain the greatest
possibilities for improvement in domestic service, is that of
establishing training-schools for servants, such schools to have a
regular course of study and to grant a diploma on the satisfactory
completion of the work. Much can be said in favor of the theory of
such schools. If universally established, they would greatly lessen
the ignorance and inexperience of the employees—one of the greatest
stumbling-blocks in the way of improvement in the service. The diploma
would be in effect a license without the objectionable features of the
latter, and it would be a testimonial of capability and moral character
more reliable than the personal recommendation of previous unknown
employers. It would render possible a better gradation of wages, a
more perfect organization of domestic work, and more satisfactory
business relations between employer and employee. In no occupation is
there greater need for systematic training. The army of incompetents
in domestic service is not greater than in other occupations, but
incompetency here is far more productive than elsewhere of inconvenience
and positive suffering. Without such public and regular training every
housekeeper is compelled to make a training-school of her own house,
and too often she herself lacks the necessary information she ought to
impart. But two test questions must be applied to the theory. First, as
far as it has been carried out, has it accomplished what was expected
of it? Second, is the training-school for servants in harmony with the
educational, industrial, and social tendencies of the day?
The demand for such training-schools has been almost universal, and
reports of their immediate establishment on a large scale have been
repeatedly circulated through the press. One of the most widely spread
rumors concerned a movement to be set on foot in connection with the
World’s Fair in 1893 for the organization of a national body with
branches throughout every state and county in the country, each of
these branches to establish a training-school for servants wherever
practicable, and another concerned a scarcely less extended work to
be begun in Washington. As far as can be learned, however, the number
of such schools actually established has been extremely limited, and
most of these have been discontinued for lack of success. As far as the
results have been concerned, it must be said that, while not a failure,
they have been far from commensurate with the efforts expended. In one
training-school with accommodations for twenty, where neither labor nor
expense had been spared to make it a success, there were when visited
but five persons in attendance, and these five were the most unpromising
material that could be brought together to train for such service, one
being a partial cripple, another very deaf, a third too young to take the
responsibility of a general servant, a fourth was deficient in mental
capacity, and the fifth was a Swedish girl who attended to learn English.
Another school also having accommodations for twenty reported that the
number had never been full. The most successful of them all had had, a
year or two since, total attendance of about four hundred during its ten
years’ existence.
The practical difficulties in the way of all these schools have been
many. The minimum age of admission has been fixed at sixteen, but there
has been constant pressure to make exceptions to the rule and take
girls under that age. The course has been usually one of three months,
but this time is insufficient for the thorough training of immature
girls in household duties; yet to extend the course is to decrease the
attendance. Those who enter such schools do so, not because those who
have attended them have been unusually successful in securing work and
retaining good positions, but because sent there by friends, guardians,
pastors, or city missionaries. In no instance, so far as known, has a
person entered a training-school because she found herself incompetent
to fill the position she had taken, or from a desire to perfect herself
in any branch of her work. Much has been accomplished through these
schools for the individuals attending them; personal habits have been
improved, better motives in life given,—everything that has been most
admirable in a philanthropic way. But it must be said that they have done
little or nothing towards accomplishing the object for which they were
established; the effect in elevating domestic service, in increasing
the supply of trained servants, in lessening the prevailing ignorance
of household affairs, has been infinitesimal. _The training-school for
servants is and must be a failure as long as the class for whom it was
founded will not voluntarily attend it in any considerable numbers for
the sake of the instruction it is primarily intended to give._ They
will not attend it because while there is a theoretical demand for
such schools on the part of employers there is no practical demand for
them. Young women will not spend three months in learning the details
of such work when they can receive high wages for doing it without
such instruction; not until domestic service loses its distinctive
marks of drudgery, menial servitude, and social degradation will the
training-school receive any large accession to its numbers. Moreover,
public opinion has not yet demanded that every housekeeper should have
both a general and a technical knowledge of domestic affairs before she
assumes the care of a household. The stream cannot rise higher than its
source, and the training-school for employees cannot succeed so long
as employers are content with unscientific methods in their own share
of the household duties. It is often said that by the establishment of
training-schools for nurses what was formerly a trade, held in little
repute, has become a profession second only in importance to that of the
physician, and that in a similar way the training-school for domestic
servants would elevate domestic service. But a vital difference exists
in the two cases. Until scarcely more than a generation ago the medical
profession could lay little or no claim to being an exact science. Most
medical schools were poorly equipped and had a short course of study,
while all their processes were largely experimental. But the Civil War
and the scientific studies resulting from it have made of surgery an
exact science, while rapid strides in biological investigation have gone
far towards making other branches of medicine also exact sciences. It
has been well said that “educational forces pull from the top, they do
not push from the bottom.” It has been the educational forces pulling
from the top as a result of increased scientific knowledge among the
leaders of the medical profession that have made the training-school
for nurses a necessity. Not until similar forces pull from the top in
the household through the scientific and economic investigation of the
processes carried on there, will a permanent, successful training-school
for employees be even a remote possibility.
It must be said also that the training-school for domestic servants must
be a failure as long as it is out of harmony with the tendencies in all
other fields of education and industry. Technical schools are everywhere
springing up, and the demand for them is constantly increasing. But the
technical school teaches general and fundamental principles, the wood
carver learns drawing, the plumber chemistry, the architect mathematics,
and the engineer mechanics. In each trade or profession the first step
is the principle underlying it, and the second the practical application
of the principle. In the training-school for servants with a three
months’ course, the educational idea is and must be totally different.
Those attending it are taken without examination, often they have had
no previous education whatever, they may be of varying grades of
intelligence and capability, and any attempt at classification according
to these grades is impossible. Its members must learn how to cook without
a knowledge of chemistry and physiology, to care for a room without
knowing the principles of ventilation and sanitation, and to arrange a
table in ignorance of form and color. The work must be learned by simple
mechanical repetition—a method fast disappearing from every department of
education.
Again, such a plan is in opposition to present political and social
tendencies. A training-school for servants is an anomaly in a democratic
country. No father or mother born under the Declaration of Independence
will ever send a child to be trained as a servant. A striking
illustration of this is found in recent accounts of a new building about
to be erected in a large city for the use of a woman’s organization.
Those in charge of the organization established a few years since a
kitchen garden for the children of the poor. Families recommended by the
Charity Organization Society were visited and the attendance of the young
daughters of the family solicited. “At first not a few mothers objected
on the ground that they did not wish to have their daughters trained
to be servants, even if they were poor, but when it was explained that
the object of the kitchen garden was to make the children more tidy and
useful in their own homes the objection usually disappeared.” Yet in
the face of this experience—a common one wherever kitchen gardens have
been started—the managers of the organization have provided for the
establishment of a training-school for servants.
The opposition to such schools on social grounds is not strange. No
recognized industrial aristocracy is possible in America. There are no
training-schools for masons, carpenters, day-laborers, or clerks. In the
technical school the boy learns masonry, carpentry, and brick-laying, but
in these schools there is no division of those attending into “classes
for gentlemen” and “classes for laborers.” American men will never
recognize one kind of training for a superior social class, and another
for an inferior. The training-school for servants means the introduction
of a caste system utterly at variance with democratic ideas. It has not
been possible at any time since the abolition of slavery to educate any
class in society to be servants; it will never again be possible in
America. Democracy among men and aristocracy among women cannot exist
side by side; friction is as inevitable as it was between free labor and
slave labor in the ante-bellum days. Opportunity for scientific training
in all household employments must ultimately be given in such a form that
any and all persons can obtain it, but it can never be given in a school
distinctively intended for the training of servants and called by that
name.
Another plan, perhaps less widely but even more earnestly advocated by
its supporters, is that of co-operative housekeeping. There has been much
looseness of phraseology in referring to this plan, and many experiments
have been called co-operative housekeeping which are such in no sense
of the word. Co-operative housekeeping, pure and simple, as described
by the pioneer in the movement, Mrs. Melusina Fay Peirce,[289] means
the association in a stock company of not fewer than twelve or fifteen
families. The first step is the opening of a co-operative grocery on
the plan adopted by the Rochdale Pioneers, and this to be followed by
the opening of a bakery, and later by a kitchen for cooking soups,
meats, and vegetables. The next department to be organized is that of
sewing, beginning with the establishment of a small dry-goods store, and
developing from this the making of underclothes, dresses, cloaks, and
bonnets. The last step is to organize a co-operative laundry. The main
industries pursued in every house—cooking, sewing, and laundering—are
thus to be taken out of the house and carried on at a central point,
while the profits on all the retail purchases are ultimately to accrue to
the purchasers.
The advantages in the scheme are in the saving of expense in buying,
economy in the preparation of all the materials consumed, a division
of labor on the part of the co-operators which enables each to follow
her own tastes in work, and a removal of all difficulties with the
subject of service by making the servants responsible to a corporation,
not to individuals. The essential point in the whole plan, and that
which justifies the name, is that each housekeeper is to take an active
part not only in the management, but also in the actual work of the
association, since co-operation ceases to be such if one individual or
“manager” is paid for assuming the responsibility of the business.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Co-operative Housekeeping Association was
organized in 1870 with forty shareholders and continued about one year.
It approached more nearly than any other experiment that has been made to
the ideal of its chief promoter, Mrs. Peirce, but failed in the opinion
of its founder for three reasons: because all the shareholders did not
patronize the co-operative store; because three departments of work—a
bakery, kitchen, and laundry—were begun at the same time instead of being
allowed to develop as experience should dictate; and because the whole
was given over to the charge of a board of seven directors, one of whom
was to be a paid officer and the manager of the entire business. The
theory in its realization, therefore, lacked some of the essentials of
a true co-operative enterprise, but even in this form it is believed to
have been the only experiment that can in any real sense of the word be
called co-operative housekeeping.
The plan of co-operative housekeeping would, if carried out successfully,
undoubtedly remove many of the difficulties of the question of service.
But it presents others, some of which are inherent in human nature
and therefore not easily or speedily removed. It presupposes that all
persons are equally endowed by nature with business instinct, which
by cultivation will develop into business success; it overlooks the
fact that ninety-five per cent of men do not succeed in business when
conducting it independently, and that these are in the employ of the few
gifted with executive talent, “one of the rarest of human endowments.”
Again, the same difficulty exists as was presented to Louis XVIII. when
he attempted to create a new order of nobility after the restoration of
the Bourbon line; history tells us that he could find many willing to
be dukes and earls but none willing to be anything less. Most persons
are willing to co-operate in the management of an association, but
modern industry, Nicholas Payne Gilman has well said, “takes on more
and more the character of a civilized warfare in which regiments of
brigadier-generals are quite out of place.”
Co-operation also requires for its success certain positive
characteristics. It implies an ability to subordinate the individual to
the general welfare, to sacrifice present comfort to future good, to
decide whether an act is right or wrong by making it general, to put all
questions on an impersonal basis. The principles on which the family
is organized and the conditions surrounding the housekeeper make these
necessary qualifications peculiarly hard to attain. Ideal co-operative
housekeeping implies ideal co-operators, and these it will be difficult
to find before the majority of the employers have more business training
and more unselfishness than are now found.
All the arguments that prevail against co-operation in ordinary business
enterprises must prevail against the system in household management. “All
that is needed is the proper person to take the charge,” it is often
explained. But it is at this very point that the theory breaks down. If
the competent manager is secured, the plan ceases to be co-operative
housekeeping. But the competent manager is the most difficult person in
the world to find. “The man we want to manage our farm has a farm of his
own,” said a city lawyer of the old family homestead; the same principle
holds in the household. It must be said too that neither productive nor
distributive co-operation has yet proved an unqualified success in other
industries where the difficulties to be encountered are far less than in
the case of that most complicated of organisms—the modern household. A
larger number of successful experiments in co-operation must have been
tried in this country in other and simpler fields before co-operative
housekeeping can prove a panacea for all the troubles attending domestic
service.
Certain practical difficulties have also been found. In all experiments
in pure or partial co-operative housekeeping it has been found impossible
to deliver cooked food hot and invariable in quality at the same hour to
all the members of the association. In one city a company was organized
as a business enterprise to furnish hot lunches to business men at
their offices and also to supply family tables. The prices charged were
double those of ordinary table-board, but the expenses were very heavy,
no dividends were ever declared, and the object was ultimately changed
to that of supplying clubs and private entertainments. That clock-like
regularity in the serving of meals, demanded alike by health and business
hours, is impossible, unless co-operation is universal, where families in
the association reside from five to twenty blocks apart.
But the most insuperable objection to co-operative housekeeping as a
remedy for the troubles with servants is the fact that the majority of
persons do not wish it. The proposition suggests to many the homely adage
of curing the disease by killing the patient. When its friends say in
its favor, “Every time an apartment house is built having one common
dining-room and one kitchen a blow is aimed at the isolated home,” the
great majority of Americans rise up in protest. The semi-co-operative
system of living is apparently rendered necessary in New York City by
reason of the enormous value of land, but wherever the detached house
having light on four sides is possible, as it is everywhere else, the
American home-lover will rally to its support. Unless the desire for
co-operative housekeeping and co-operative living becomes more general
than it is at present, some other means of relief must be sought.
Much, however, of the so-called co-operative housekeeping is in reality
co-operative boarding. This is true of “The Roby” experiment tried
successfully for a time at Decatur, Illinois.[290] Fifty-four of the
leading persons in the city formed a club, adopted a constitution and
bylaws, elected officers, and found that through this organization they
could “live off the fat of the land for $2.75 per week.” The plan in its
essence is an old one; it has been followed for years by college students
in institutions that do not provide dormitories. In many college towns
it is rendered almost necessary by virtue of the residence there of many
persons owning houses who wish to take lodgers but not boarders and of
many women without capital who wish to act as housekeepers. But probably
few college students consider it an ideal way of living, it is tolerable
only at a time of life when new experiences are always welcome, and few
have ever been known to continue it beyond college days.
Undoubtedly by a system of co-operative boarding many families could live
better, at much less expense, and at a saving of time and certain kinds
of friction. But co-operative boarding is to the employer what high wages
are to the employee—he is willing to sacrifice something for what seems
to him _life_, that is, in this case, the unity, privacy, quiet, and
independence of family life. The friction with servants is obviated since
the plan includes a housekeeper who is to stand between the co-operators
and the employees, but the common interest of desiring freedom from the
care of servants and of securing the best board at the lowest rates is
not a tie strong enough to bind together those whose interests in other
directions are most diverse. Co-operative boarding will do much for the
vast army of persons obliged to board, but all such plans should receive
their proper designation and not be called co-operative housekeeping.
For the great majority of housekeepers who do not care to give up their
individual homes, the system proposed will bring no relief.
Still a third scheme called co-operative housekeeping is that proposed
by Mr. Bellamy.[291] This is a union of co-operative housekeeping and
co-operative boarding, with the application to both of certain business
principles already recognized in the housekeeping of to-day. In so far
as it is a combination of the two plans already discussed, it is open
to the same criticisms as are its component parts, while the business
principles suggested are the result of the same unconscious, not
conscious, co-operation that governs all industries.
It must be said, therefore, that all of these various measures of relief
proposed to meet the difficulty fail, because, like the golden rule and
the admission of the employee into the family life of the employer, they
do not touch the economic, educational, and industrial difficulties; or
because, like the license, the importation of negro and Chinese labor,
the training-school for servants and co-operative housekeeping, they
run at right angles to general economic, educational, and industrial
progress. The question how to improve the present condition of domestic
service is, however, not a hopeless one, but the answer to it must
be based on an examination of the historical and economic principles
underlying the subject.